It’s times like this that you really evaluate what truly matters in your life and how small are the things we hold dear to ourselves.  All the things we waste time upon instead of truly treasuring the people who make life worth living.  And one of the serious offenders for taking time away from loved ones is games.

The key to games is understanding that games can be powerful servants but awful masters.  Few people realize that games are more than just a past-time – gaming is one of the most powerful tools for accessing and repairing damaged parts of the brain and can be a great boon for humanity rather than a massive time waster that widows wives and orphans children.

Games can repair the brain

Games are a powerful tool not just for education, but for real neurological benefit.  My initial foray into gaming was making games whose task is to stimulate neurological functioning.  Many of these games would seem very inane and resemble variations of the game “Memory”, but given enough time and practice these games can actually improve brain function, delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, and rehabilitate stroke symptoms.

What got me thinking was that my mother will need these kinds of games for her rehabilitation as well as entertainment to enjoy.  But a great number of games that she loves and enjoys are simply not accessible for persons without fine motor skills.  One may not think that using a mouse is a “fine motor skill” but for persons with severe neurological damage, a mouse is so much harder to use than a keyboard.  How many games out there do you know are designed for use with a single hand that is not a mouse?

Not meant for accessibility

I’ve taken a lot of thought and decided that after I release my fall game that I will dedicate myself to making not only games that my wife and kids will enjoy, but that my mother can access and use with limited motor function.  I used to be one of the first web technology experts at Booz | Allen | Hamilton for the U.S. Government standards for accessibility (Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act), and so I am familiar on how all technologies can be utilized to overcome all sorts of neurological and physiological disabilities.

Games don’t have to be just mere entertainment and escape.  Games can be an instrument of true freedom and a great boon to humanity and the human drama.

Over 5000 Arrows at 30 fps

Mike Grundvig posted on his blog how he got this to work and after reading it over twice, it is very “old school” in how it is accomplished.

The way Flash does programmatic animation is pretty simple.  You take a MovieClip instance on the screen and you simply adjust the x,y values to get it to move.  Flash takes care of the redrawing of the screen for you with no flicker. What Mike Grundvig did was do all the drawing himself.  Instead of using Flash to draw the final output on the screen, he takes all the calculations on the back-end, draws onto a BitmapData object and swaps out the resulting BitmapData with the Bitmap currently being displayed.  In other words, he is doing a kind of low-level “double buffering” using Flash Bitmaps.

When I was a kid programming in BASIC in the Apple II+, I would wonder how computer games made smooth animations.  My problem was when I created a picture and I wanted to “flip” to the next frame of the animation, I had to clear the screen and draw the next frame.  The clearing of the screen caused a moment of blackness before the next frame was rendered.  What I didn’t understand was how to “double buffer” which is something much lower level than I could have achieved in BASIC.  I had to understand assembly language to accomplish that.

Effectively what “double buffering” does is skip clearing out the screen.  Instead of working on 1 screen, you are working on 2 screens.  First you draw the screen.  And instead of clearing it off for the next screen, you do all your drawing logic on the second screen while the first screen is being displayed.  Once drawing is completed, you simply flip from the first screen to the second screen like a flip-book.  That removes the flicker effect of having to draw, erase, and draw again.

Modern graphical engines like Flash take care of this logic for you and are incredibly efficient.  Thus, instead of having to figure out how to draw when you move your MovieClip 10 pixels to the right on the next frame, Flash does all the drawing for you.  But it comes at an expense of CPU cycles to figure out all that drawing logic for you.  You can see the effects of this drainage in Space ROX when I started adding particle effects and Asteroids.

Space ROX V 0.5

Now compare the performance of only a couple hundred particles in my Space ROX demo to the thousands of arrow particles shown in Mike Grundvig’s demo here.

Sometimes it pays to go back to the basics.

I just discovered the “Bitmap” and “BitmapData” classes in Actionscript 3.0 from this blog tutorial on FlepStudio.

Here is an example of what his tutorial and sourcecode looks like:

Actionscript 3.0 - Bitmap and BitmapData Tutorial

This class could have saved a ton of performance and speed in Strike Eagle.  In Strike Eagle, the moving background is a series of movieclips placed side-by-side and continually scaled which is a huge performance hit in the system.  It would have performed so much faster if I was simply blitting onto a bitmap.

Also, all the particle effects in Space ROX could have used the bitmap treatment saving tons of processing power and reducing the total number of movieclips.

Strike Eagle - From April 1st to May 10th

So far, Strike Eagle has produced close to 170,000 hits on the Internet with 140,000 ad impressions.  Today, I submitted Strike Eagle to “Flash Game Distribution” a site affiliated with “Flash Game License.”  Once the game is approved on FGD, I will track how many more impressions it gets once the automated system starts submitting the game around to other portals and sites.

When I wrote Danc of LostGarden on May 4th, Strike Eagle barely came over the 100,000 mark in ad impressions.  It has been steadily climbing and remaining close to 6,000 requests a day since.  In 6 days, it produced another 30,000+ impressions.

Frankly, I am astounded that the numbers are still climbing.  I only submitted my game to MochiAds (Distribution-enabled), NewGrounds and Kongregate.  For the latter two, the game no longer gets gameplays.  I’m not sure how it is being driven because I honestly believed that the game hit its peak with the spike occurring back on April 20th and then will slowly be dropped off the Internet in the wave of new Flash games coming down the pipe.  So I’m not sure what is driving up the numbers again recently.

So I submitted the game to Flash Game Distribution and will report my findings in the next few weeks to report on how much an impact FGD has.

Strike Eagle V 1.0

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Check it out!

The game has been completed and is now pending approval on MochiAds for publication on their site and for the contest. It has been a long month and it feels like I’ve been working on the game forever. Now I am officially releasing all the interim builds along with their mistakes under the “Strike Eagle” tagline. I think it is important not only for myself, but for other indie developers to see the struggles, compromises and changes that go into game development especially when under time constraints and pressure. This blog is meant to educate and inform and show game design and development in action.

Among several major compromises was that the game is far too short for my liking. I would loved to have done several different landscapes, levels and breaks in the middle of the game. But I had put in about 3-4 hours a night for about 6 weeks to get it this far and I had to cut back on my final vision. Admittedly, a complete rewrite of the 80’s “Afterburner” arcade game in Flash in less than a month and a half and working only at night is quite aggressive.

During this time, I had to sacrifice an astonishing amount of sleep which I recovered on the weekends and on some weekday nights where I could not stay awake any longer. My youngest son, was constantly by my side, sleeping on the couch and waking up from time to time to remind me that I’m human and that I need rest. My eldest son was encouraging me by his excitement and enthusiasm to just play the game and asking for more features such as shooting down enemies – and maybe someday I’ll add the robots he asked for in another game.

And my beloved wife… I couldn’t have done it without you. I almost gave up had it not been for you.

There were some very unexpected events that happened during the making of this game – most especially sad was the loss of the beloved cat Louie “The Count of Monte Meo.” He is actually the mascot in the logo for “Counterpunch Games” which is a play off his nickname “The Count.” After much discussion and deliberation, we retired the logo and put a dedication to him in the actual game. We hope to resurrect his memory in a much stronger and more thought out brand for our future game endeavors.

There is a long list of people whom I wish to personally thank, especially the friends who helped me, inspired me, and encouraged me along the way.

Mike Bilter and Scott Lightfoot who I first met in my first attempt to start a game development career and inspired me to go indie. Scott, thank you for the late-night discussion of making a game just like this.

Sheridan Layman and Jeremy Alessi who I met through the Richmond Game Designer’s Special Interest Group. Thank you Sheridan for creating the group and getting us all together. And thank you Jeremy for your inspiration as a published indie game programmer with much accolades from indie guru Jeff Tunnel himself.

Jeremy Kane, Brian Lowry, and Todd Scarola are some of the most brilliant and talented people I have every had the privilege to work with. Thank you Jeremy for showing me that no matter how busy your family keeps you, you can still make time to learn more and master your craft in the wee-hours of the night. Thank you Brian for your entrepreneurial spirit and inspiration. And thank you Todd for encouraging me to not doubt myself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with programming giants.

Thank you everyone. I hope you enjoy the game and I especially hope to make many more of them in the future.

But for now… I need some sleep.